winit VS raw-window-handle

Hi! I’m Aloke, an engineer at Warp.

I’m really excited to share that Warp is now available on Linux! If you’re interested in trying it out, you can download Warp: https://warp.dev/

Building Warp on Linux was quite an undertaking. Warp uses a custom Rust-based UI framework that we built in house and renders natively on the GPU. To get Warp running on Linux, we built a version of our UI framework that supports winit [1] as a windowing backend. We also built a version of our renderer that uses wgpu [2]. Reducing complexity by using these well-supported, cross platform, frameworks let us bootstrap a version of Linux quicker than expected and should make it easier to build Warp for other platforms (like Windows).

Please let me know what you think! Happy to answer any questions, either about the product or about technical challenges.

[1] https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

Have you seen the official example?

That's a bit shortsighted given that there is an active discussion about reducing the interior mutability.

There are a number of up-and-coming Rust-based frameworks in this niche:

- https://github.com/iced-rs/iced (probably the most usable today)

- https://github.com/vizia/vizia

- https://github.com/marc2332/freya

- https://github.com/linebender/xilem (currently very incomplete but exciting because it's from a team with a strong track record)

What is also exciting to me is that the Rust GUI ecosystem is in many cases building itself up with modular libraries. So while we have umpteen competing frameworks they are to a large degree all building and collaborating on the same foundations. For example, we have:

- https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit (cross-platform window creation)

- https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu (abstraction on top of vulkan/metal/dx12)

- https://github.com/linebender/vello (a canvas like imperative drawing API on top of wgpu)

- https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (UI layout algorithms)

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (text rendering and editing)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit (cross-platform accessibility APIs)

In many cases there a see https://blessed.rs/crates#section-graphics-subsection-gui for a more complete list of frameworks and foundational libraries)

Name: Francesca! Location: Portland, OR (UTC-7) Looking for: Remote only, full-time or contract. Contact: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-lovebloom/ GitHub: https://github.com/francesca64 Experience: 4+ years of professional Rust experience; former lead maintainer of winit and creator of cargo-mobile.

Window manager: https://github.com/rust-windowing/winit

I'm using winit and softbuffer for my CurrentProject™.

I've been working on a little rust project that uses the winit crate to open a window, then I'm gonna use a custom renderer to draw to it. I need a platform specific window handle to do that and winit has a function for that. It returns an enum of type RawWindowHandle from the raw-window-handle crate, which winit specifies as a dependency. However I can't actually use that type because I haven't specified that as a dependency of my crate.